I just would like to create a topic for a project released on GitHub on November 2016 called UUV Simulator, mainly aimed to simulate unmanned underwater vehicles such as AUVs and ROVs. It includes Gazebo plugins and several ROS nodes and it is built modularly to help the construction of complex simulation environments for underwater vehicles.
The project has been going through a lot of updates and changes thanks to several suggestions from the community and it has grown significantly since we managed to publish it on GitHub.
Recently I added an improved documentation site (still being updated) and some extra packages for robot models and some useful ROS nodes, such as a plume simulation, that are also available here https://github.com/uuvsimulator.
Hi! I’m using your UUV Simulator for my MS Thesis with the subject “Localization of an unmanned underwater vehicle using multiple water surface robots, multilateration, and sensor data fusion”.
In a first approach i will develop an algorithm verification on UUV Simulator and for that reason i’am developing an “Acoustic Channel Communication” that consists in two sensors: a Beacon and a Hydrophone. I hope to help and contribute to this great project.
Would like to throw out there that we’ve been using UUV sim for awhile now and so far have really liked it. Our only issues have been there’s no debian(that’s now been remedied, thanks @musamarcusso) and our PR’s seem to get a bit stale when we have a proposed fix, so we are forced to maintain a fork for extended periods of time. Other than that though we have had a good experience using it and really appreciate the work @musamarcusso has done to get it where it is today. If there’s anything we can do to help with the package let us know and we will do our best. We rely heavily on uuv_simulator for our simulations and would really like to help it progress.
@Jordan_Lack - Glad to hear others are using this great tool. Based on the discussion at the recent Underwater ROS Workshop @ Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution it seems like there is an increasing desire from the community for building more functionality on top of the UUV Sim. Would Houston Mechatronics be willing to contribute to open-source projects that improve/extend the general capability?
In general I think yes(though i’m in no position to officially state this, i’m just a peon ), we try as much as possible to never fork and/or build from source if a binary version of a third party dependency is available. Additionally if we have an open source third party dependency we regularly submit pull requests for features/bug fixes we have in order to continue use of the binary and not add a source dependency.
We have submitted a number of pull requests for features and bug fixes to UUV Simulator and have a number of others in our local fork that we would like to submit back upstream so we could remove our source dependency and start using the new debian. Our only hesitation is that our pull requests don’t get much attention, and this is a deterrent to us spending the time to organize a pull request if it’s going to sit there for extended periods of time.
I’m wondering if the uuv simulator is good to go with ROS melodic? I did see a commit from December presumably for making it compatible with melodic, but I did not see instructions for it in the documentation and was wondering if anyone else has or is using it with melodic.
Hey guys, thank you for the amazing feedback. I am currently working on other projects as well, but I am doing my best to keep the repository running.
Hopefully I will get back into schedule soon.
), we try as much as possible to never fork and/or build from source if a binary version of a third party dependency is available. Additionally if we have an open source third party dependency we regularly submit pull requests for features/bug fixes we have in order to continue use of the binary and not add a source dependency.